6 OctOber 23– 29, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP). Although Texas’ record for most execu- tions in the U.S. is not closely contested, Cuellar says the times are changing. Five men were executed in 2025, a far cry from the Lone Star State’s peak of 40 executions in 2000. Two other men, one of whom is Roberson, received stays — a court order that suspends a planned execution. Harris and Tarrant counties are the only counties where prosecutors have pursued new death penalty sentences this year, the TCADP states, and at least one of those cases was re- jected by a Tarrant County jury. Only six new death penalty sentences were imposed statewide in 2024, and it is primarily defendants who were tried de- cades ago that now make up Texas’ death row population. “The people on death row now who’ve been there for decades are part of this legacy of the death penalty,” Cuellar said. “That’s something we have to continue to confront, even as we acknowledge the fact that the death penalty has changed so significantly here.” The Abolitionists I t wasn’t until the Rev. Cheryl Smith was in her 60s that the death penalty moved from her “periphery” into full view. Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, she’d been exposed to conversations about civil rights, but it took her being assigned to lead a United Methodist church in Huntsville to really consider what it meant to live in a state that puts people to death. It was an evening in 2011. She hadn’t been in town long and was driving to a meeting at the church when she drove past the Walls Unit. It was surrounded by people holding signs, and even though she’d never before witnessed the protest that takes place each time an execution is scheduled, she “imme- diately knew” what was about to happen. “It just kind of hit me in the gut with the realization. Oh my gosh, they’re going to kill somebody on Main Street tonight,” Smith said. “That changed things for me from that evening on. I attended just about every sin- gle execution for the next four years that I lived in Huntsville.” “The first execution I stood at was over- whelming,” she added. “I went to my car and just sobbed. I don’t sob every time any- more, but the feeling is the same. It’s disbe- lief, it’s sadness, it’s powerlessness, it’s anger. It’s a lot of things.” Once Smith was transferred away from Huntsville, it became more difficult for her to attend executions, but she did when she could. Now retired, she stands vigil on the evenings when inmates are set to die, and she works alongside the TCADP on more formal advocacy efforts. Her opposition to the death penalty is rooted in her religious beliefs; she feels that executions come from a desire for the state to exercise vengeance, something that she believes Jesus taught against. Her protests are often quiet, if not silent, and she wears her clerical collar because she “wants people to know there are people of faith” standing against the use of capital pun- ishment. In the winter, when the sun has set by the time a 6 p.m. execution takes place, she holds a votive candle. At the end of each vigil, she rings a singing bowl once for each year the individual served on death row. Fourteen years after first coming to Huntsville, the ex- perience remains “sobering.” On one hand, Smith continues to be sur- prised that she is often the only religious fig- ure present at the protests. On the other hand, she feels that conversations about capital punishment are still far from the mainstream. A common misconception about the abolitionist movement is that, by advocating for state-sanctioned executions to end, opponents are showing support for an aggressor rather than the victim. Smith says that “of course” she cares about victims and issues like crime, but she also cares about not expanding “the pool of people who are in grief.” Smith recently agreed to serve as a spiri- tual adviser for a man on Texas’ death row. To her, there is little distinction between that work and her life’s ministerial calling to offer pastoral guidance when asked. “You can describe redemption in lots of different ways, but [I believe] there is hope for people to be changed, if given a chance,” Smith said. “I know that my standing out- side the Walls is not going to change any- thing. It changes me. It’s important to me to bear witness and to say, ‘I stand here and this is wrong.’” If Smith’s method of protest is defined by her solemn observance, Linda Snyder’s is notable for her hands-on approach. Snyder began protesting the death pen- alty in 2014, when she co-founded the group the Texas Death Row Angels alongside abo- litionist Dani Allen. At the time, her hus- band’s brother-in-law was living on death row, marking the first time she’d had to con- front the idea of capital punishment. When his sentence was changed to life in prison, he asked Snyder to keep in touch with his friends who’d become “like family to him.” Living up to her brother-in-law’s wish, the Angels offer companionship to the men on death row through letters, calls and visits and help them obtain commissary items such as books or hygiene products. Snyder regularly welcomes family members of those on death row to her ranch house in Wortham, an hour south of Dallas, and coordinates airport pick- ups for out-of-state families. The women also help pay for cremations after a person is executed if family members are either no longer around or decline to claim a body. They estimate they have paid for nearly a dozen cremations over the years. If unclaimed after an execution, the state pays for cremation or burial, and the re- mains are buried at the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville. A 2014 Texas Ob- server report describes headstones in the cemetery labeled with “X,” “EX,” or “999” to designate, even in death, a prisoner who served on the row. “Most of them don’t want their bodies on [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] property,” Snyder said. “We’ll do whatever they want with their ashes. We’ll send it to their family or, if they want their ashes spread somewhere, another state or a park or something, we’ll do that for them too. … It’s hard to be executed, and that kind of gives them a little bit of peace.” Fighting the Stigma W hile a majority of people sentenced to death row are men, the individu- als who spoke with the Dallas Ob- server for this story believe that a majority of the people who protest the death penalty are women. For decades, there has been a notable pat- tern of adoring women flocking to men who have committed heinous crimes. Serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were inun- dated with love letters after their crimes went mainstream, and Richard Ramirez, the rapist and killer known as the “Night Stalker,” actu- ally married one of his fans. These sorts of relationships have re- ceived little serious academic attention or research; the Wikipedia page for “hybristo- philia” (a more official-sounding label than “prison groupie” or “Bonnie and Clyde Syn- drome”) is 10 paragraphs long. But the trend has contributed to a cultural stigma that some of the women who protest Texas’ death row have found difficult to shake. Allen experienced that stigma firsthand a decade into her journey as a death row advo- cate. She first found herself drawn to the ab- olition movement in 2005, a few years after she and her husband moved to Texas, and she took note of the number of executions happening. (In Allen’s first two years in the Lone Star State, 52 executions took place.) Despite having a history of violence in her family, she found herself thinking that “it seemed wrong” to allow executions because “you can’t kill someone to show that killing someone is bad.” She began attending protests outside the penitentiary in 2011 (and has missed only one since), and in 2013, she began co-host- ing The Prison Show, a radio program that reaches prisons in 45 states and offers jus- tice system-related news updates, familial shout-outs and musical performances for inmates. The goal of the program is to help inmates feel “connected” with the outside world, a desire she came to intimately un- derstand in 2015, when she first met Texas death row inmate Billy Wardlow. Allen fell in love with Wardlow, and, after leaving her husband, the two became en- gaged in 2017. Their wedding was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Wardlow was executed after 25 years on death row in July 2020 for the robbery and murder of 82-year-old Carl Cole in East Texas, a crime he committed at age 18 in 1993. “The stigma is so real, for not just being involved in a relationship with someone, but even the stigma of being friends with some- one [on death row],” Allen said. “I was trying to help people on death row. I can’t tell you how many people I visit, both in the general [population] and on death row, and Billy was different. … When your minds connect, you can’t help that.” Wardlow’s execution was one of five Al- len has personally witnessed, a final act that cements her “every day” mission of ensuring the men on death row “feel loved in some way” and know they are not alone. But even after two decades of advocacy, there are some situations in which Allen still feels un- comfortable with the attention being a death row abolitionist brings. In April 2022, Allen was a witness for the execution of Carl Buinton, who was sen- tenced for the 1990 killing of a Houston po- lice officer. When she emerged from the death chamber, she was met not by the usual abolitionist protesters but by a “sea of po- lice” who’d come out in support of the fallen law enforcement officer. “They were staring at us like we were just beneath them, like we were crumbs,” Allen said. “It was horrible. They were yelling stuff at us. It was really bad.” The Innocence Effect N early every person interviewed for this article agreed that two recent cases have been instrumental in driv- ing public attention toward Texas’ use of capital punishment: Melissa Lucio, Jordan Maddox A group of death penalty protesters wait to hear the latest news in Robert Roberson’s case on Oct. 17, 2024. Unfair Park from p4 >> p8
